Last night's chili went much better--even the staff got to eat. I've got a system now to better deal with the poorly designed kitchen and the disastrous mix of over-enthusiastic and sometimes too many volunteers in the kitchen.
It's been hard to develop procedures and figure out how to run the kitchen best because myself and the volunteers all arrived at the same time. I wasn't able to train them on kitchen protocols because I was still trying to develop them. The effect has been like letting a puppy run the house and deciding to train it later on. For example, when it jumps up on small children? (Mom, how is Scott doing with his new anti-jumping training?). They work really hard and they're a great team but they sort of got to make their own rules up for the first 2 weeks and now I have to break them of annoying habits, like putting things away in the wrong places, or walking in and out during meals.
Clean up is especially difficult because most kitchens have two hatches and two doors. Mine has one of each and it's not practical to move any food or dishes in or out through the door. I'm nothing if not competitive and looking for a challenge--the Our Chalet kitchen certainly fits that bill.
Now that I know more about moving dirty dishes, clean dishes, and food all through one window, I can make serving and cleanup move about 15% faster. In fact, we were done by 8:15 last night as opposed to 8:45 the night before (I think that's more than 15% but we didn't have desert dishes to do so I'm being conservative in my estimate).
In other news: I managed to delete about 1/4 of my iTunes music library! No more Decemberists or Belle and Sebastian for me (and other things I haven't realized are missing yet I'm sure). Nobody panic though, I can replace it.
France won the Euro Cup game last night.
Yesterday I made: about a thousand gallons of Chili, 6 kilos of rice and 240 chocolate chip cookies.
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